Since 2009, Water.org has sought to bring clean water to millions people who don't have access to this basic necessity. The new hope for the nonprofit, which was founded by actor Matt Damon and Gary White: By creating longterm relationships with consumer-facing brands, it can reduce reliance and on big-money donors and instead drive public giving and public conversation on a massive scale.

To test this model, Water.org partnered with beer brand Stella Artois for the Buy A Lady A Drink campaign, which promises consumers that the purchase of a single chalice will provide clean water for somebody for five years. We sat down with Damon and White to talk about this model for charitable giving, and how corporate partnerships could be increasingly key to engaging customer bases for giving and for good.

Tell me a little bit about this campaign in your own words, as if to an alien who has no idea what it is?

Matt Damon, actor and cofounder of Water.org:Well, we started working with Stella a few years back, and we did a one-year deal with them. Today, we've reached 800,000 people with clean water through this initiative with Stella. It went so well that we all kind of came back the next year and said, "Let's do this again. This is going great for everybody. The dating was great, but let's get married."

So we did this big four-year deal with them, and it's just really big. We'll reach 3.5 million people at least with clean water by 2020 through events and raising awareness, but also through the direct connections our consumers can have with this issue. Stella came up with these really clever ways to activate their consumer base. Everything from the sales of the chalices, which are these beautiful art pieces, to walking into a bar and ordering a Stella in the United States or the UK—which will bring one person clean water for a month in the developing world. Also, buying a six-pack or a 12-pack in a grocery store will bring either six months or 12 months respectively of clean water to somebody in the developing world. It's a really great way for a customer who is interested and wants to know that what they can do can have a direct impact. You can walk into a bar on Saturday night with your friends and buy a round of drinks and know that you just brought someone clean water for a year.

It seems like this could be a model for charities to engage with consumers in ways outside the traditional donation model. Is that the idea?

Gary White, cofounder and CEO of Water.org: Yeah. That's part of it. That's what we're calling for here. We would like other brands to join us and form a collaboration to get this done because we know that as powerful as this campaign is, it's still not going to be enough to get it done. As we've brought in more brands, we've been very fortunate. We have worked with lots of other brands like PepsiCo and their foundation, Ikea, Mastercard, Bank of America, and others, but none of those have activated quite in this way. They brought great resources to us, but I think this can be a model for how we can work with so many other brands.

Matt Damon: What they report back to us is that it really matters to their customers. That's something that you could really feel changing, and we definitely felt it this year. There was a marked difference from three years ago. These companies are now talking about engaging with their customers and the morality of their customers in a totally different way. People vote these companies in and out of business with their pocketbooks, and this matters. Issues like this are on the radar of the millennials.

The campaign promises that if you buy a chalice, it's five years of clean water for somebody. Can you break down how you get that figure? How does that black box work?

Matt Damon: You're asking the exact right person.

Gary White: A typical water project, like a hand pump on a well, will last about 20 years. It costs about $25 per person to get that installed for a village. If you look at that $25 and break it down over the 20 years, it comes out to about $1.25 a year. When you buy one chalice, $6.25 of the chalice comes to water.org to make that happen.

Matt Damon: There you go.

A part of what water.org does involves microfinancing. Can talk about that model for charitable projects and why you guys are kind of drawn to it.

Matt Damon: This is a real innovation. It was an insight that Gary had years ago by spending his entire adult life interacting with the poorest of the poor and spending time with those communities. He made the observation that these people were paying for water already, whether they were paying a local water vendor or whether they were paying with their time and leaving jobs in order to go stand in a line with a jerry can at the assigned moment in any given week and standing around with thousands of other people waiting to fill their jerry can too. It was tremendously unproductive.

He said, "Okay. These are people surviving on one dollar, two dollars a day. They don't have any savings. What if we could figure out a way to front them the money for a water connection?" In a lot of these urban and peri-urban areas—take India for instance—in a slum you've got immiscibility piping water right under their feet. They're just not connected to the infrastructure. If you could just front them the money for a tap, you could put a faucet right in their house and essentially buy back their time.

It's not an income-generating loan, like classic microfinance, but it is an income-enhancing loan because you're buying the time back. Rather than have to ever go stand in this line again, they can work those extra hours and pay the loan off. His hunch proved to be, his hypothesis proved to be more right than we ever could have hoped. I mean, these loans pay off at more than 99%. We've brought safe water and sanitation solutions to over 5.3 million people at this point. Its a scalable and sustainable idea.

It seems like there's some level of dignity associated with it, too. People probably have more pride in the project.

Matt Damon: I was just going to say. They're participating in their own solution.

Gary White: So many water projects fail. Nobody is going to take out a loan for a toilet or for a water connection if they don't want it and if it's not right for them. That really builds the whole layer of sustainability with this. I think it's important to look at the leveraging, too. We've put about $16 million into water credit to kind of jumpstart these markets with our microfinance partners. That's now leveraged more than $220 million of commercial capitol. We're seeing this demand increase, but we also see that we could be doing even more. That's why we created water equity for just social impact investing. Our impact capitol now has a targeted financial return to investors between two and three percent. Then we take that, help people get safe water, then people get their investment back with interest. That, I think, is the key to bringing in more investors in the US and Europe so that we can scale even faster.

Water.org has gone in a very short time from being nothing to being one of the better-known charitable organizations in the world. Why do you think that is? Do you think it's the story resonated or do you think it's Matt's involvement or something else?

Matt Damon: Our programming works. I think that's the most important thing, and that's what people really respond to. When they poll Americans on this issue, on all these issues, whether it's gun ownership or whether it's extreme poverty, what polls the highest is when things work. Americans want things that work. If it works, it doesn't matter if you're a Democrat or you're a Republican. You're all for it. This has the benefit of being a nonpartisan issue. There are people who embrace it on the right and the left, but also, it just makes a lot of sense. Americans like to know that they're not throwing their money down a rabbit hole.

Last question here: If you make a movie about the water crisis, what would it look like?

Matt Damon:If I knew I would have made it by now. If you have any ideas, I'm open.